my lonely pride

This country
This beautiful country
This dirty country
This old country
This dangerous country

It's hard to love this country
When everyone else around me hates it.

It's hard to love this country
When this country bites me back.

With trash in the streets, careless people, angry sweaty people, terrible leaders, injustice, force, a covering over my body, the sun burning my feet.

It's hard to love this country
Because when you're there, you're miserable.

It's hard to love this country
Because if you look, everything's a mess.

The smog layered in the skies, blood in the gutters, a place with no work, a crowded place, hot, tense, the sun pulsing in my eyes.

It's hard to love this country
When it's own people have left without a fight, and they look at me
with that same changed look,
and seemed to have forgotten what they are.

It's hard to love this country
When it threatens mine and everyone else with missiles.

I cry to the music of Sonati, I cry to the familiar sound of Farsi, i cry for the ever-tightening strings of my heart.
where is the music? where is the art?
where is the laughter? where is the tea and ghalyun?

It's hard to love this country,
The people i love are there,
The things i love are there,
The life i love is there,


My heart has been left there,


And i remain alone, with pride of this country.

I am alone with this,
dangerous,
old,
dirty,
beautiful,


country.


my iran.

acc

This is a journal from my speech class. Just some humor to keep a teacher from being bored.




This class has a little effect on me. I do think about it in my spare time. I would like to contribute a little to discussions, but i don't. It's not that i'm shy, because i'm not shy at all. It just feels a little awkward to be walking into a class full of adults. In my whole life adults,(excluding teachers or counselors) or just strangers in general, didn't want much to do with me. I'd be ignored or just given a glance at. Why would these people want to ask me my name or any other question? What would they want to even know about me? Some younger kid. Then when i sit in the class room and i watch people talk and say things that are incredibly similar to what I hear in my class room at school. The same ignorant, funny, intelligent, opinionated, logical, educated, sweet, low self esteemed words and sentences that my classmates say. So i realize that they're just like younger people except with a bigger body, or have kids, or are getting ready to move out. They only have an experienced tone to their voices. I only wish i could just forget that they're adults and start talking with these people already.

Sometime last week, my boyfriend had said that he wanted to eat me. This is a Persian sweet talk,(We are Persian) and he always tells me this. Since I believe everything that is said, which is either a gift or some dumb thing about myself; honestly I'm not sure if he really does want to eat me or if he's just joking! Then I thought about that scale that was drawn on the board in my speech class last week. "Edible------not edible." In his eyes, I would say knowing the variables of this situation, I'm probably all the way on the end of the left side, which is Edible. Then if you count in my bones, my hair, my teeth, nails, and certain organs of my body which are inedible, because of that percentage of my body, I slide more and more to the right as "not edible." Then of course if this person loves me and he would never want me to be gone forever, I would be pulled all the way to the "not edible" side. So like this my brain has connected my speech class all the way to bloody Persian love. And I will say, I have never been so flattered in my life to be told that someone wanted to cut me into little pieces and proceed eat them raw.

describable

if some one built a bridge from my house to your house, even if it were on fire, even if it was filled with broken glass and i had no shoes, even if a million ahmadinejads were on that bridge, i'd still walk it to get to you.

--maryam